Twitch to shut down in Korea over 'prohibitively expensive' network fees
Twitch to shut down in Korea over 'prohibitively expensive' network fees
Twitch plans to shut down its business in South Korea on February 27, it said, after finding that operating in one of the world's largest esports markets Twitch plans to shut down its business in South Korea on February 27, it said, after finding that operating in one of the world's largest esports ...
Could also have something to do with how corrupt their office is over there. I've heard lots of allegations of female streamers needing to do things such as send nudes or perform sexual acts to stay on the platform. Similar to how the kpop industry is run.
Shouldn't be that big of a deal. It's not like they are that into video games in checks notes hoo boy!
I don't think Twitch is a major player for streaming in Korea anyway, and Naver just announced they were going into the space, so it's not surprising that Twitch is bowing out.
I'm surprised Naver isn't already the big streaming platform there already, they're involved in pretty much every other tech market as far as I've heard
S. Korea doesn't need more Naver/Kakao crap dominating the market.
Kinda suprised by this. I usually don't use twitch, but last time I was there practically all streams in the largest category were korean. Typically, tech firms don't mind red numbers as long as their user base is enormous.
Typically, tech firms don't mind red numbers as long as their user base is enormous.
They didn't while it was cheap to borrow money. Since interest rates have risen, you can't make these kinds of investments anymore without having some immediate pay off.
It helps that they don't have any serious competitions at the moment but it's very naive to think this won't bolster a competitor enough to make some threat. I guess they feel untouchable with even YouTube struggling
I wonder if the new Twitch competitor that rises in Korea will get the TikTok treatment and our government will just ban it by name?
No, that was step one. Operate at a loss until you suck up all of the users and kill off as much of the competition as you can. Now we're at step two, where the time has come where they desperately need to actually make money, e.g. YouTube. You're going to see more and more "free" sites/apps/services entering step two, if they haven't already.
The importance of net neutrality.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Twitch plans to shut down its business in South Korea on February 27, it said, after finding that operating in one of the world’s largest esports markets is “prohibitively expensive.”
In a blog post, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy said the firm undertook a “significant effort” to reduce the network costs to operate in Korea, but ultimately the fees to operate in Korea was still 10 times more expensive than in most other countries.
While we have lowered costs from these efforts, our network fees in Korea are still 10 times more expensive than in most other countries.”
The Amazon-owned streaming service said it has been operating in Korea at a “significant loss,” and there was “no pathway forward” to run the business sustainably in the country.
It’s unclear why network fees is so expensive in South Korea, though Clancy might be alluding to the recent controversial deliberation in the country to require tech companies to pay for network costs.
Korea has always and will continue to play a special role in the international esports community and we are incredibly grateful for the communities they built on Twitch,” wrote Clancy.
The original article contains 242 words, the summary contains 189 words. Saved 22%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
We are likely going to see more of this kind of thing.
Services like Twitch, Netflix, etc have had a long time of using the pipes for low or no cost, and contributing nothing to the network except congestion.
No one expects the roads to be maintained for free, and for businesses that use the roads, they gotta pay.
EDIT: I retract my statement, barsoap gave a pretty detailed explanation of what's going on here.
This is a bad take, and the antithesis of net neutrality.
If the customer pays for a connection, the ISP should be able to provide that. Why does it matter if it’s Twitch or Netflix traffic vs anything else?
Video streaming is a MUCH heavier load than text based sites and even image based sites. Anecdotal, but I am aware of at least four of the street side boxes that failed early in the pandemic because the constant teleconferencing and streaming was literally orders of magnitude more concurrent traffic than at any time in the past. That has a cost. Theoretically, it is a "one time" cost but it is also a significant one.
My personal feeling is that this is the ISP's, optimally the local government's, problem. But I don't know enough about how Korean ISPs and infrastructure are handled to have a proper opinion on this. But I can definitely see a push to throttle certain sites that make up a significant majority of the overall load. It is not net neutrality but... is one site accounting for 40 or 50% of the traffic net neutrality either?
So do you think that shipping companies should charge fees to both sender and recipient? Because that's the physical equivalent of this situation.
I pay my ISP to deliver data to me at an agreed rate. The data being streamed from the bandwidth heavy sources has been paid for... By me. It would be wrong for my ISP to then go and charge them for the bandwidth that I'm using, much in the same way it would be wrong for a company to both charge the sender and receiver of a package just because that package is heavier than normal.
And many of the CDN agreements that bandwidth heavy content providers sign with ISPs have favourable terms specifically because those ISPs recognise that having good access to that content is exactly what their customers are paying for... At least the ones not completely blinded by greed do.
That's not how billing works on the internet: You hook up to an IXP for a flat rate depending on the port bandwidth you want, then make peering agreements with other people there. If traffic levels are about even, say, a regional ISP with a neigbouring regional ISP, they will just deal with traffic directed at each other for free.
But that only connects you to the next ISP, not to the whole internet, to get at the whole internet you peer with a tier-1 provider, people who run connections to IXPs all over the world so you can reach all. They're going to want money for that, and they're going to bill by maximum upstream bandwidth you sent out to the internet you used in that month1.
If you're an ISP that's generally fine, you're getting money from your customers, if you're a company with a webserver that's also fine, bandwidth isn't that expensive. If you're someone who puts petabytes on the pipes though, that includes the likes of netflix, you want to do something different: You want a box at every IXP that caches content so you can peer with those regional ISPs directly. That's also generally for free because while you're sending a lot of data, hooking up directly to you means that the ISP won't have to pay their tier-1 provider for the upstream part of the connection (there's always ack packages etc) and it's not like the total amount of traffic they're dealing with increases, it only shifts. Historically that has been akamai, the original peering slut (peers with everyone as long as they're sober), now there's a gazillion of CDNs and content providers like netflix which run their own CDNs.
The only ones complaining about that are tier1 providers which are also ISPs because they'd rather have all those CDNs pay them for using their fibre than not use their fibre and make things more efficient. They're rent seeking. And ISPs who want to triple-dip and have you pay by volume, which noone on the internet pays for.
Oh: What you pay your ISP for is a line and share of a port to the IXP, its maintenance, and your share in what they're shelling out to their tier-1 provider(s) for the stuff you upload into the wider net. Which is btw why asymmetric connections (higher download than upload bandwidth) make sense even if the underlying connection is symmetric: Provided the ISP's infrastructure is fast enough receiving more packets over their line only costs electricity, and a negligible amount thereof.
1 It's not "maximum" but "modulo 1% spike or something" don't ask me about the exact maths
Hmm.. yes actually, those are good points...
So do you think that shipping companies should charge fees to both sender and recipient? Because that’s the physical equivalent of this situation.
I mean... they do? There are fees to load and unload cargo onto boats/planes/whatever. Hell, big rig trucks also have prices. This cost is just generally masked (and pushed to the consumer...) when you order something from Amazon (because this IS Amazon we are talking about)
And shipping companies will often tend to mask this. They either eat the cost (because they are using significant parts of that shipping container themselves) or ensure they are making a significant profit on all the other packages so they can give lower traffic a better deal and so forth.
Which... is what led to the kind of shitshow where Amazon eventually ended up investing a LOT in their own internal shipping infrastructure (and the gig economy). Because UPS/USPS/FedEx realized that a very significant percentage of their packages were from a single company. And that was already one of the bigger companies on the planet by that point.
So let's continue to torture this metaphor. I am old enough to remember when you could put almost anything in a fedex envelope and they would ship it. I also am old enough to remember getting confused why they were weighing a package one time and factoring that into the cost. Because there was a general assumption that the volume of a package was strongly correlated with its weight and all that mattered was how much truck space it used. Then they learned that people ship a LOT of books (hmmm... Hey, what did Amazon start out as again?) and the flat rate packaging prices went way the hell up and there was a much bigger emphasis on weighing packages (and a lot of flat rate boxes actually do have a maximum weight in the fine print).
In theory, the price of shipping covers the repairs on the trucks and the planes and so forth. And, on average, it does. It doesn't pay for the gatorade bottles for drivers to piss in while they are driving between stops, but it does cover oil changes, repairs to suspensions, etc. Until the underlying math shifts heavily and needs to be readjusted. Now they need to repair suspensions much more frequently, do more cargo flights (oh god, that means even more chances for Tom Hanks to be stranded on an island!), buy better trucks, etc.
Which then becomes the question: Should everyone's cost of use increase to cover this? it now costs me 10% more to ship a package because fedex needs to buy new trucks this year. And, because capitalism, that is never going down and the increased profits next year will be considered a win for the new trucks. Or should the "We Have Lex Luthor at home" mother fucker stuffing trucks full of hardcover books to build his empire maybe get charged on a different tier?
And same thing with internet traffic. We are charged based on an expected "weight" of traffic. Too much traffic and hardware tends to fail more regularly or need to be upgraded. And a certain percentage of upgrades are factored in to those internet bills. But if EVERYTHING needs an upgrade, that becomes a very significant cost. Which, again, either is going to be spread out among all users or just Bex Buthor who is the main cause of it.
But you'll notice I stopped talking about USPS REAL quick during that long ramble. And that is because USPS still have flat rate packaging for dirt cheap. And it is part of the core of the organization that you could literally fill that up with tungsten (or a child) and they would deliver it, no questions asked (I think they would ask about the child these days, but it is still a story worth looking up). And that is because they are (keeping it simple) part of the US Government and are subsidized as a result. This is essential to get... essentials to people in rural and under-served communities.
Which... is what is already happening with a lot of internet infrastructure in the US. Google ain't gonna roll up and do the paperwork to lay fiber, so counties and states are doing it and hoping an ISP will use it. And a lot of us argue that internet should be treated like any other utility in that regard, but there are a lot of issues with that approach that I won't get into.
As for Korea? I genuinely have no idea how their internet (or shipping) businesses breakdown. So I have no idea if the above is at all relevant or if this is just a case of politicians being assholes or what. But... any time Amazon is involved, I tend to assume they are at least 30% at fault.
But... kudos on picking the absolute best possible metaphor to explain this. Like, genuinely. Because we all know the "internet is tubes" metaphors don't work. But, when you are thinking in terms of an ISP, the Internet kind of IS shipping packages.
Ah yes you're right, the Internet is a series of tubes and we need to pay the plumbers to maintain the tubes for leaks
I pay for download speeds and volume, seems only fair on the providing side. Also, fuck twitch. Constant unskippable ads, left the service years ago when they killed the APIs that ended third party apps.
You can use an adblocker for twitch(takes more than the average user to implement tho)
It's a real shame that IPv6 multicast is as IPv4's multicast implementation (global multicast not propagated by ISPs). I feel like live streaming/live TV over the internet could have made really good use of this feature.
It would in theory mean that they wouldn't even need to operate their own servers in other countries/regions. One server could feed everyone.
The problem is a real one, Netflix for example have ISP level caches so that their content isn't streamed across the open internet when it doesn't need to be. But in the rest of the world it's been resolved differently. I'm honestly not sure how ISPs keep up with the backhaul requirements for an ever increasing requirement for speed.
A lot of politician-level takes in this thread.
Am I missing something? You're the only poster in this post besides me and a bot.
Either this is the coldest takedown i've seen on Lemmy so far or your instance's federation is having a sad. I can see 21 comments itt including users from lemmy.zip, lemmy.world, lemmy.nz,and sh.itjust.works